Reserving phones for Extension Mobility users...

[scottatorange]

I’m looking for an app that would allow me to reserve/activate IP Phones in specific ‘hotdesks’ for extension mobility users on a daily basis.  Basically, I would like to disable extension mobility on phones in ‘hotdesks’ that have not been assigned to prevent users from just grabbing any ‘hotdesk’ they felt like…any ideas?

Scott

[David Hailey]

Interesting use case...typically, EM is used for just the opposite but nothing wrong with something different.  I'd like to say I've run across a tool that does this; however, I have not.

In terms of what you're looking to do (as it has sparked curiousity), what would be your logic behind the daily provisioning of the phones?  In other words, how and when do hot desks get assigned and what is the business case from preventing users from just grabbing any EM-enabled phone as long as they can login and do what they need to do?

Hailey

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[Jaime Valencia]

You can enable or disable EM via BAT.

You can create custom files ahead of time if you already know which phones you need to enable/disable or use the qry option to look for them at the moment.

Another option would be that you create an axl app to do such thing.

HTH

java

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www.cisco.com/go/pdihelpdesk

[Aaron Harrison · Accepted solution]

Hi All

Since AXL keeps coming up I'm going to throw you something that might be useful to you. Or it may not...

Basically I've a little AXL program written in java that you can call from a command line only (no GUI, but means it is scriptable) to make AXL calls based on info in a CSV file.

1) In the attached zip, are some class files. Unzip these into a folder (e.g.  c:\axl)

2) Install a JRE (go to www.java.com and hit the big install button; for future ref it's written for JRE1.6 which is current now)

3) Create yourself an input file, like the example EMTest.txt file in that zip:

updatePhone,name,SEP123412341234,enableExtensionMobility,false

These fields are - type of AXL request, attribute used to identify the device to change, value of that attribute, property to change, new setting

So in the example above, the AXL request will be updatePhone, name (devicename) will be used to pick the device to update, the name of the device to update is SEP123412341234, we want to change the enableExtensionMobility attribute, and set it to false.

So you can have multiple lines in the file, and the program will fire them all at CCM. Set up an input file with whatever phones you want to be enabled for EM for a given day, and then run the update on the day (or better still, schedule a task using task manager and running the command as below, but from a batch file.

4) Run the program like so from a command prompt:

C:
Cd \axl
Java UpdateOneProperty -username=ccmadministrator -password=password -host=192.168.0.71 -input=EMTest.txt

5) Hopefully your properties will be updated in CCM. Bear in mind:

- This will work for Linux CCMs only - the AXL URL is different in 4.x
- Everything you do is case sensitive, and the AXL API can be a tricky beast - make sure you test any change against a SINGLE device before pushing out anythign in bulk. The AXL API often returns happy responses to invalid things, but it is more likely that nothing at all has changed than anything bad happened...
- This prog is a quick/easy way to update simple properties of an object on CCM. So this means things that can be set by identifying the attribute, and what you want it to be in two columns. So you can set anything that is set to true/false on a device, anything that is set to a single parameter from a drop-down box (e.g. CSS, urls, MOH etc).
- If something involves complex AXL calls (such as linking lines to phones, or creating new devices etc) then you can't do it with this.
- Take a look at the AXL schema for your version of CCM (available at http://developer.cisco.com/web/axl/docs) to see what other 'update' types you can do.

Regards

Aaron

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[scottatorange]

Thank you Aaron, your response was very helpful and what I was looking for.

To answer Hailey…we’ve had some issues where our facilities group will reserve several ‘hotdesks’ for small groups of remote users who finally drag into the office.  The problem we’ve run into is that some other random remote user will make their way in and sit in the reserved cube and log in…essentially squatting in an assigned ‘hot desk.’  We’re looking for an easy way to force them to sit in their reserved ‘hotdesk.’ 

Thanks again!

Scott